A coyote took up residence in Chicago’s Norwood Park neighborhood this spring. It’s hard to say how long it was there before anyone noticed it, but once someone did all hell broke loose. In mid-April Chicago television cameras and newspaper reporters descended, and the coyote graciously cooperated, posing with alert ears and bright eyes in the backyard of a white house. It turns out that despite repeated searches and the setting of a live trap, the coyotes were never caught....

HEATON-MURPHY DUO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since they started performing as a team a couple of seasons ago, guitarist Matthew Heaton and flutist Shannon Murphy have gathered quite a following. Neither is yet a knockout virtuoso, but the duo’s winsome personality and penchant for imaginative programming set it above most other start-up acts. For their latest series of recitals focusing on music of the Americas, these Northwestern graduates (Heaton trained with Anne Waller, Murphy with Mary Stolper) have come up with some gems....

Jennifer Krauss: Homing In While both male and female artists deal with home and family life, it’s no surprise that women artists more often depict the home as a troubling, intimidating, or entrapping place. Jennifer Krauss, in her six sculptures at Wood Street, presents ordinary household objects in a way that suggests fears, threats, even traumas. One untitled work is an armchair upholstered in a floral fabric with a skirt about ten feet long....

Studio 108, at the Organic Theater Company Greenhouse Lab Theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Somewhere beneath this stilted, slow production is a darkly funny, if flawed, script about a pack of losers hanging out at a craps table waiting for a high roller named Johnny Red. But director Valerie Olney has filled the show with so many arch moments and meaningful pauses, accentuated by Robert G....

LUNA / LOW METRO, MAY 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The band’s third, eponymous album, its first without Cale, proved to be the most musically prescient and reverberating. The album cover is an unpretentious, almost relaxed shot of the band reclining in a living room; correspondingly, while Reed’s lyrical motifs could never be called mundane, his themes on this record are markedly less out there than on the band’s preceding albums....

Lead Story Among cities that have mile high clubs: Hayward, California; Santa Monica, California; Meriden, Connecticut; and Cincinnati. For fees ranging from $199 to $279 a pilot flies a couple around for an hour so that they can have sex while airborne. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New products: toe floss (invented by Ronald M. Hannon), a rope that attaches to the floor of a shower and is held taut, permitting the user to clean between the toes; a tiered cocktail waitress “dress” that holds 250 canapes, from designer Bruno Ferrer; a 30-inch-tall, porcelain-headed doll of Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight in his signature red sweater and Converse sneakers, from doll maker Tom Alberts, for $545; and a line of toilet-seat lids in the shape of guitars (electric and acoustic), starting at $49, from Marvin Maxwell of Louisville, Kentucky....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Eureka Springs, Arkansas, aldermanic candidate Louise Berry died on October 6, but her supporters continued to run ads against her opponent. On November 8 Berry won by a narrow margin. Also in Arkansas, attorney general candidate Dan Ivy won his fight to stay on the ballot despite having been recently convicted of beating his wife. Mrs....

For generations downtown dining was defined by the three Bs: Berghoff, Binyon’s, and the Blackhawk. Today only Berghoff remains intact. Binyon’s, sold a decade ago, is a shadow of its once wonderful self, and the Blackhawk is long gone (though its proprietor, 82-year-old Don Roth, still operates an eponymous spot in Wheeling, featuring great prime rib and a legendary “spinning salad bowl”). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doug worked several years for his father Don–who took over the Blackhawk in 1944–but wasn’t much interested in the business at first....

Who was the runner-up? Friends of Downtown recently gave awards in eight categories for outstanding achievements, including “Best Continued Scent” given to the Blommer Chocolate Company for “their magnificent contribution to the sensory experience of downtown.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Too much of the nation’s scientific agenda is set by movie stars and rock-and-roll musicians,” complains Alan Schriesheim, director of Argonne National Laboratory (Roads & Bridges, September), citing the public-service ads that denounce Styrofoam on environmental grounds: “A study in Science magazine compared Styrofoam cups with paper cups....

“I loved the baseball strike last year since it meant the end of inundation by Cub fans,” says Bill, a twentysomething slacker who’s hung out in front of the Dunkin Donuts at Clark and Belmont for the last five years. “Cub fans walking between Waveland and Belmont are scum. They boo at us, make fun of us. I don’t need no less self-image than the one I already have.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In 1990 a Swedish documentary team headed by German investigative journalist Michael Schmidt began to track the rising neo-Nazi movement in Schmidt’s newly reunified country. The findings they released two years later offer a scary and sobering look at history threatening to repeat itself. Taking its title from the neo-Nazi slogan that echoes the old Nazi exhortation “work will make you free,” their hour-long cautionary tale has the tone of a horror movie, complete with creepy, apocalyptic music....

He was the last person I expected to see in a Gap ad. But there he was, staring up from the pages of Newsweek. Not some hip, young artist in a black t-shirt, or Ernest Hemingway in a photo appropriated by an ad director who never got past the first chapter of The Sun Also Rises, but a bland, lumpy-looking young executive, crouched on some vaguely postmodern piece of furniture, wearing khakis....

JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATRE at the Athenaeum Theatre, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s Bill T. Jones’s Soon, which he made for his own company in 1989. This unsentimental romantic duet captures all the ordinariness of living together day by day, then turns a corner and discovers the sudden, hard feelings that are just as much a part of intimacy. The entire dance is washed by the sensual longing in the five songs that make up the score: two old blues tunes sung by Bessie Smith, two songs by Kurt Weill, one by Bertolt Brecht....

Shortly after singer-songwriter Michael Hall moved to Chicago from Austin, he was booked in a New York club for the CMJ music conference. Hearing that the Chicago quartet Dolly Varden was playing the conference as well, he called up Varden principal Steve Dawson and asked if the band would back him in New York–and at an upcoming solo Chicago show as well. “Uh, sure,” Dawson said. Later he asked Hall why he’d called them....

Bad Rap at the Trib Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December 1992, during police protests over an Ice-T appearance at the Vic, the Tribune printed a page-one photo caption stating that the song “Cop Killer” “advocate[d] the slaying of police”–a sexy claim undermined only by its inaccuracy. Last week in a report datelined Washington on Carol Moseley-Braun’s gangsta rap hearings, Trib staffer Linda Harrington wrote about the “menacing words” of sometime rapper Sister Souljah, who had told “blacks to stop killing each other and kill white people....

A pop generation ago, Manchester, England, produced a crop of bands whose churning dance rock and puree of influences both modern (hip-hop) and ancient (60s classic rockers) combined to create an intense and seemingly portentous branch of pop music. Among these were the Charlatans (the “UK” is a legal nicety in the U.S.), who were more grounded than the drugged-out Happy Mondays, more focused than the more acclaimed Stone Roses. Their fame in England was immediate, but some boys from Seattle got in the way of worldwide domination, and most things British were quickly forgotten....

Cindy Dall Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cindy Dall’s solo album is built on layers of self-contradiction: Stylistically she flits from lumbering gothic dirges to desolate cabaret to jagged, skeletal rock. Her fantastical lyrics use angels, dragons, and castles to explore concerns like mortality, self-hatred, and betrayal. Several songs speak commandingly from the first person, but she negates herself by refusing to title the disc or print her name on its sleeve....

I first noticed the billboard on a rainy Friday night as I was driving south on Elston from Cortland. I had to make a U-turn to double-check what I thought I’d seen. The billboard had a picture of Smokey the Bear standing in front of hills and trees with the caption, “Most causes want your checkbook: He wants your matchbook.” Smokey stood with his left paw on his hip, his right foot propped on a shovel and his other front paw on its handle....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No, Harding’s talents are not as rarefied as are those of Nancy Kerrigan or Oksana Baiul, but if she can finish eighth in the world by displaying “clumsy style and slovenly technique,” what does this imply about the talents and accomplishments of all those who finished below her? Or of all those who didn’t even make it to the Olympics?...

I heard him before I saw him–a clackety-clack sound coming from a semicircle of about 60 people. In front of them was a guy with big blue eyes and blond ringlets with a touch of gray, wearing an old T-shirt with “The Bones Show” emblazoned on it and a gray vest with a button bearing his likeness. He played two pairs of what he called “vegetarian” bones, though he also had a pair of the real thing–cow ribs....